Bullies Choke New Girl — Unaware She's A Deadly MMA Fighter
Chapter 9
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"It makes me feel like I'm not just waiting for something bad to happen," Ren had told her.Her mother had smiled, sad and proud at once. "That's not nothing, baby. That's actually everything."Ren wiped her eyes once, hard, put her phone away, and stood up. Waiting for something bad to happen was over; she just didn't know yet what she was going to do about it.That same afternoon, Ren sat in the college library with the only person at Marian County who'd bothered to be kind to her without an angle: a soft-spoken classmate named Odessa Pruitt, who fixed transmissions better than half the boys in the program and had zero patience for any of them."You look like something's chewing you up inside," Odessa said, not looking up from her textbook."I'm fine.""You keep saying that. Doesn't make it true."Ren almost laughed. "It's a lot. Grady and his friends. People talking. Some idiot texting me about a video that doesn't even exist."Odessa closed her book. "You want me to tell you something? Grady Voss picks on people because everybody's too scared of his last name to push back. Nobody's ever made him actually feel it.""Feel what?""Consequences," Odessa said simply. "The man's never had one in his life."Ren didn't answer that. She just turned it over quietly in her mind, the way you turn over a stone in a riverbed, checking what's underneath. She wasn't ready to say what she was capable of—not even to someone as steady as Odessa—but something had loosened in her chest since that text message arrived, since the small, unnoticed truth she'd finally said out loud to herself. She was starting to understand that consequences might be coming for Grady Voss, whether she planned them or not."You ever think about just leaving?" Odessa asked, closing her notebook. "Transferring somewhere else, starting fresh where nobody's heard any of this yet?"Ren considered it a moment—genuinely, the way you consider an easy way out before deciding against it. "I thought about it the first week," she admitted. "But I'm tired of starting over. This is the third school in two years. At some point, you have to just stand somewhere and let it be your place. Even if it's hard.""That's either really brave or really stubborn," Odessa said."Probably both," Ren said. "Most things worth doing usually are."Down the hall in his office with the brass nameplate, Dean Whitfield sat alone after everyone else had gone home for the day. He hadn't told Silas Boone the whole truth that morning—hadn't told him about the phone call he'd gotten from Roy Voss two days before the incident even happened, a call reminding him, in that friendly, dangerous tone powerful men use, that the diesel bay renovation still had one more funding installment coming. Nothing explicit; Voss never said anything explicit. Just enough of a reminder to make a tired dean look the other way a little longer than he should have.